Yeats from Faery arcana to worldly activism

        In his old age Yeats is the living embodiment of his Gyres-vision of the historical evolution of civilisations : his material body is on the wane, while his poetic soul and the material on which it thrives--images--are waxing. His Gyres-vision is merged with a Hobbesian mechanistic determinist viewpoint, which latter views all human experience as motion :
(a) animal motion--cf. the political/military activity of Tone, Gonne, Markiewicz, and the Falstaffian Irregular ;
(b) cerebral motion--Yeats himself.
        In Ireland, prior to the increasing manifestation that civil war, the Second Coming, the terrible beauty, the Leviathan were at hand, Yeats had tried to fulfil his determined poetic role of cerebral motion founded on images--in Hobbes, memory is equivalent to fancy, imagination--through forging a fictional Faery-land of images. These and later attempts by the 'cerebral' types are--as he acknowledges in Galway Races--a misdirection of the national mood, for the latter is increasingly identified with arms and politics. And so, as in Words, Yeats professes to have come into his strength, and sheds the Faery trappings. Thereafter, his 'cerebral motion'--actualised in poetic images--can be seen to converge with the 'animal motion' taking place on the road outside my door. Yeats is committed, indeed determined, into this active role.
       Both Yeats and the political activists are 'in motion', and for Hobbes the greatest evil was to  resign the course, to retire to a self-satisfying contemplative existence. This is the ambience of Il Penseroso, Plato, Plotinus, and, because this is a cerebral ambience, Yeats is sorely tempted to be contented with abstract things.
       The Fates' dispensation is that Yeats be a poet, but he doesn't simply relay images blandly, as his form of action and commitment to the historical gyring towards a Second Coming which is taking place all around him. He declares his choice, defines his activist's role, in Sailing to Byzantium : it is an identity with the Iconodules' concept of the function of the image (stanza 3 ) as intermediary to the prototype Idea, as set against the singing bird type of image redolent of those manufactured under the last Iconoclastic emperor, Theophilus--where the image's function is simply decorative ( thus, the drowsy emperor ).
      In short, Yeats' use of image, within his contemporary sphere of action/motion, will be as intermediary to an Idea. And this Idea is that the Ireland of old--Cuchulain, Cathleen, Coole, etc.--is waning, and a new Ireland is being forged in the heat of civil disorder : a new civilisation is waxing. In this role, the mature Yeats, having come into his strength, sees the poetic road before him, has found the images he will constantly rework. It is a complex imagery, but it is at least used consistently, and for both reasons his image-stock as a sort of battered kettle at the heel. Yeats the poet may well be derided for his choice of imagery, and for his seeming non-participation in the hurly-burly of 'animal motion', but he is playing his part in the great historical events that his poetry portrays. The way of Il Penseroso is tempting, but in his old age and in his responsibility Yeats sticks with the battered kettle.

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